The University of Gastronomic Sciences mourns the sudden loss of Professor Marco Riva, who contributed so much to its founding. His intelligence and spirit will live on with us, even if death has taken him away.
Though the man is gone, his thoughtful reflections on food culture, germinated in Pollenzo, remain. A technologist, Marco Riva took from technology a perspective that was at once critical and multilayered, considering interdisciplinarity not an unbearable trial but a temptation into creativity.
His interests and versatility made him, from the first days of the university, an interpreter armed with the tools of science, of gastronomy and of the challenges that gastronomy faces.
After four years of teaching, of campus life, of collegiality with co-workers, and of academic experiences, he developed a profound curiosity for food and its subjective and objective worth. On this, both food technology and conviviality, Marco Riva, Christian and Communist, deliberated.
His apartment in Bra, on Viale delle Rimembranze, was a philosophical dining hall and hospitable roundtable, into which he would invite guest cooks, teachers and others, before plates of studied simplification. I recall in particular a saffron risotto he cooked in the microwave, and how time ran out before I could challenge it with my own, cooked on the stove.
Alberto Capatti